Poetry in California

Can you really blame us for falling in love with a poem about a red bicycle on a day like this?

The Dog Days of Poetry

The Dog Days of Poetry

As both a student of literature and editor for Foothill, it is critical to approach both what I study in class and what I review for the journal with an unbiased eye. Long gone are the days when I could simply write off a poem as “good” or “bad”based solely on my gut reaction. Now, a nuanced approach is needed. Aside from the formalist value of a work, what does it capture about a state of being, an emotion, a cultural fixation, even the zeitgeist? As graduate students and eventual scholars, we are not simply arbiters of what is good or not, but investigators, charged with drawing out and interpreting the value and relevance of what has been, and is currently being, produced.

But. Academic goggles aside, there is a single topic that captures my heart every time. One that, if you are looking for it, is ubiquitous not only in English literature, but in Greek Classics, and all the way back to the first written communications on cave walls: dogs.

Our interactions and relationships with dogs is easily taken for granted. You, if not someone you knew, grew up with dogs in the home, and it is not uncommon to encounter them on a daily basis. Indeed, their presence is so normalized that the millennia it took to foster this bond –and what a bond it is – can be overlooked because of how natural it seems. But leave it to the poets to remember this, and to untangle and illuminate the subtleties inherent to the beauty, sorrow, and poignancy that exists in this most ancient and singular of relationships.

Poet Chase Twichell confronts this topic not only in her collection Dog Language, but her whole oeuvre is rife with it. Communion with animals not only enables us to confront out humanity, but at times, to be free from it. In her poems, riding a horse frees the soul from the husk of the body; an encounter with a deer or deer carcass – the head of which one of the dogs bring inside the home in one poem – can put us in our place; the necessity of brutally killing a garden snake to preserve the safety of the home illuminates the brutality of nature. These animals remind us of our human frailty; the dogs – companion to man but pure animal – serve as a link between the human world and the natural.

In “Soul in Space” the speaker says, “I want my obituary to say that/I wrote in the language of dogs” (for excerpt: https://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/tag/chase-twichell/) (182). For Twichell, this language is one of intuitive understanding and non-judgment. To the former, Twichell takes dogs out of the corporeal sphere, drawing them not as earthly creatures, but cosmic beings. In “Cities of Mind” she writes,

Raised on classic myths,

I see the drift nets of latitude

and longitude on the night sky

inhabited by beasts and gods.

On Pegasus I fled the hunter,

the centaur, the satyr,

riding the star-horse out to free

the greater and lesser bears,

the major and minor dogs,

caged in their constellations. (187)

The poem’s subjects are time and history (portrayed through the writing process, an aging father, and the plastic decorations that appear at any birthday celebration). The poet, caged in time and the relentless pursuit of productivity, realizes at the end that when she can submit to the natural unfurling of time “. . . before you know it/. . . a jewel of history glint[s] in your eye” (187). When this happens, the poem opens up, the material world is abandoned, and history is laid out for the taking. This is when the speaker rises to the heavens on Pegasus, consorts with the animals of the constellations, and frees them from their cages. The dogs – both “major and minor” – are her last stop in this cosmic foray, a symbol of permanence and other-worldliness amid the human realm of fleeting time.

The non-judgment of dogs is exemplified in “Dog Biscuits,” where a father’s “secret violence” and his “escapades” are buried with the dogs (read and listen here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181225). The mourners “each drop a few/dog biscuits into his grave.” The animism of this act positions the very essence of “dog-ness” as a thing of redemption. This father, mentioned throughout the collection, is painted in a respectful though dubious light. In “Dog Biscuits,” his abuse towards his dogs is mentioned outright, and yet it is with the very accoutrements of those dogs with which he is buried and in essence, forgiven. Where a dog is concerned, there is no past, there is no future, only the moment in time and the full, bodily experience of that moment. Their present-centered reality takes them out of time, and thus out of the world of resentment and scorn.

I actually encountered Chase Twichell after hearing a poem read by playwright Edward Albee (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and was struck by the similarity in content between his poem, “Samantha,” and the aforementioned poem (read “Samantha” here: http://tiptoe-marie.blogspot.com/2010/10/samantha-by-edward-albee.html. Also available in the anthology Unleashed). Told from the perspective of his late, beloved Irish wolfhound, the dog recalls the incidents of his death and his perspective on his human counterparts. Unlike the other-worldliness of Twichell’s dogs, however, Samantha (the speaker of the poem) is firmly rooted in the mundane, and it is through this straightforward simplicity that the transcendent qualities of her dog nature are revealed.

When she dies, she awaits her owners’ return from a vacation in Grenada; lays “curled in a frozen sleep.” Her owners “dug a hole and put me in it,” and much like in Twichell’s poem, they “baked clay biscuits for me/placed them.” Grandiose reflections on the nature of death are markedly absent from this rendering. But the slow, measured pace, the sense that this is occurring in real time and is not an obscure lyrical reverie, adds a gentle somberness to the dog’s recollection. Her reflections are simple. She is please to be laid on the point with the other dogs, “Poochie, Jennifer, Harry, Andrew, Jane,/and the cats,” and simply wonders, “Will [the grave diggers] be put here too?/On the point? By the ocean? With us?
/I hope so.”

Any dog owner will grow noticeably quiet when confronted with the reality of their dog’s mortality. Our closeness to them (we live together, eat and sleep together) makes them remarkably human-like, yet their lives are cut precipitously short in comparison with our own, forcing us to grapple with a loss that defies the trajectory we expect a life to take.The paradox of the dog, then, is in its essence of other-worldliness – wisdom, intuition, and the like – concurrent with a raw corporeality. To this point, Billy Collins’ “Dharma”comes closest to pinpointing the dog’s quintessence (read and listen here (queue to 2:48): http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/06/05). He writes,

Off she goes into the material world


with nothing but her brown coat

and her modest blue collar,


following only her wet nose,


the twin portals of her steady breathing,


followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside

every morning

and eat all his food

what a model of self-containment she would be,


what a paragon of earthly detachment.


If only she were not so eager 
for a rub behind the ears,


so acrobatic in her welcomes,


if only I were not her god.

John Updike said: "Billy Collins writes lovely poems . . . Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides." True, yes. But Updike could very well have said this very thing about dogs, “more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.” They both raise us up to cosmic heights while reminding us of the earth below, and all the while remain constant, loyal, and silent in their multitudes.

Not all poems are great poems. But if it’s about a dog, it’s good in my book.

Twichell, Chase. Horses Where the Answers Should have Been. Copper Canyon: Washington (2010).

Hemple, Amy; Shepard, Jim, eds. Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs. “Samantha,” by Edward Albee. Three Rivers: NY (1994).

Collins, Billy. Sailing Alone Around the Room. Random House: NY (2001).